What happened to the thoughtful policy of “Don’t do stupid stuff”? President Obama was great when he used his calm oratory skills to show the ineptitude of a media questioning his cautiousness on ISIS / ISIL.
Did old President Obama write this Jon Stewart piece?
Lo and behold, President Obama has gone Bush lite. He was mostly quiet as the military industrial complex via a misleading media, convinced a majority of Americans into making him morph into Hillary Clinton, our other neocon lite.
Make no mistake, the President is following the will of the people. What he should have done is fight the media and the military industrial complex before the false narrative of an omnipotent ISIS / ISIL metastasized into the psyche of Americans.
There could be two reasons why Arab countries are tepid in their desire to engage with a group that presumably wants to hurt them. Either the group is not as powerful as advertised or they consider America their department of defense, their military wing.
We have now officially been conned into war. At this point it does not matter what the President says, the ball is rolling and turning back now would be difficult. When the president used Yemen and Somalia as the counter terrorism example, the new pseudo war template, it signaled that he would accept the perpetual engagement, the perpetual war mantra the United States has been on for decades.
The Jon Stewart Daily Show video skit above is something the old President Obama could have written. Most of the fluff was taken out to illustrate the seriousness of the piece. It explains the “Don’t do stupid stuff” tenet. Most importantly are the final words Jon Stewart articulated. The President have said them in many different forms in many past foreign policy speeches.
“We have an anniversary today,” Jon Stewart said. “The attack of thirteen years ago today was planned by four dickheads in a three bedroom apartment in Hamburg. … There is no way to militarily eliminate enough space to keep some terrorists from operating against us. So until this part of the world decides that it irks them that the belief system they hold sacred is being misrepresented to justify a perpetual violence machine, until it starts to see past sectarian lines and national borders — that okay we drew, we’ll give you that. — the United States can’t fix this. Because it cannot be fixed by waving a magic bomb.”
For this reason, just like Bush’s war left a more destabilized Middle East, Obama’s cleanup using pseudo war will maintain a destabilized status quo.